


modern romance

by bittybelle



Category: Shoujo Kakumei Utena | Revolutionary Girl Utena
Genre: Angst, F/F, Indian Character, Sexual Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-19
Updated: 2017-06-19
Packaged: 2018-11-15 23:37:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11241639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bittybelle/pseuds/bittybelle
Summary: “Dios’s power, soul, anger, lament, whatever it is, burns within her like a disease. She's stopped noticing it, for the most part. But it is there, insisting upon itself.Anthy, through the years.





	modern romance

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning for sexual abuse, disordered eating, and general misogyny.

“You stupid girl,” Dios rasps affectionately. “You stupid girl…”

It doesn’t matter. She can barely hear him above the mob.

\---

TV is good. Books are good, movies are good, radio is good, but TV is best of all. The shopping channels are fun. So many beautiful things, in such profusion: lotion flowing like rivers, bracelets she truly cannot tell apart from ones triple their price, luggage for every possible vacation.

Akio sneers. “It’s puerile. I don’t know how you can stand it, Anthy.”

She smiles, and waits for him to leave.

\---

She likes coconut, rice, plantains. She likes the heat—even when it’s humid, even when it’s inescapable. She likes the ocean. These are fixed points in her life, no matter where they have lived or what they have eaten.

Akio has always made sure she has access to the sea, always given her swimming pools and bathing suits, pastries the color of snow. “Your tastes,” he remarks, as she smiles and accepts the plate of curry he has had the cook prepare, “have always been particular.”

One day, there is an exchange student. Her name is Sruthi and her skin is as brown as Anthy and Akio’s, and just as unlike anyone else’s at Ohtori.

“It must have been a very long journey,” Anthy remarks, her heart in her throat for some reason.

“Yes,” Sruthi replies. “Kerala is—oh, that’s the state in India I’m from, it’s—“

“In the south, right?” Anthy blinks. “In the south of. Of India. I believe.”

“Yes!” Sruthi presses a hand to her lips, but it does not hide her delighted grin.  “Have you been? Are you—pardon me, I just, I couldn’t help but notice, you and—and your brother—“

“No,” Anthy says, as she has always said. “No, we’re—“

_we’re—_

\---

She makes sure the south campus café—with the peonies and the faux-rococo chairs and the live pianist—is stocked with apple fritters. Big, craggy things, pearly with glaze, arranged on a polished platter. You simply cannot miss them.

\---

Akio fucks hard. Sometimes he can be gentle, sometimes he trails a hand down her cheek and makes noises like “beloved” and “dearest,” but eventually that tenderness dissolves in the acid of his orgasm. He’ll gasp out her name and he will turn her over and she will go on being fucked, hard.

\---

There was a girl, once, in the forest. The forest that came after the other forest, that came after the long, dusty road, that came after the place she cannot name. There was girl who wore a pinafore with a tricky sort of embroidery running down the seams, a kind Anthy has not seen before or since. She lived in a small cabin with a mother and a brother but no father, and she often took the path near Anthy’s home to visit her grandmother.

She was kind. She often had boiled eggs and thyme from her mother’s garden, which she should have traded for something but gave to Anthy for free.

One day, there was a man in a wolfskin cloak, between the trees, watching.

\---

Her hood hadn’t been red, though. More of an auburn, the color of autumn leaves rotting into mulch.

\---

Nanami loves anything at least four steps past tacky. Nanami thinks Chopin is necessary to the digestion of any well bred young lady. Nanami loves apples, and apple-based desserts, and sneaking sweets in her schoolbag to eat in secret, where her brother cannot watch.

\---

What can Anthy offer a little princess with patent leather shoes, with hair the color of a licked lollipop? She’s known for years now that a woman’s pain is the most mundane thing in the world.

“This is the witch,” Dios says, and he is smaller now, younger, coltish in his epaulets of office. “All she has left is her suffering.”

 _Wait_. _Don’t go._ The words are as heavy in her throat as honey, as unsobbed tears. _Don’t leave me here. Don’t leave me alone, in pain, in the very soul of pain itself that is this room, this altar, this beating fucking heart._

But she can’t, of course. The swords shredded her vocal cords years ago.

\---

She’s not sure if she could ever become pregnant. She tries to picture her insides, the rosy machinery she has been told is there, but she cannot picture anything but skeins of doll hair, a lump of moss, a scarred ruin of pus and gore. Nothing like a home for a baby, nothing within her that might bring forth life.

But there is a month when she is late. When the blood does not come, as it has come for years—how many? Decades, centuries? She remembers rags, straw, nothing at all, an age apart from adhesives and chemical meddling in matters of the moon—and she brews a tea of pennyroyal. Something a cankered grandmother showed her years ago, a woman who didn’t ask questions and told no lies.

Blood comes. Only days later, really. She mightn’t have done anything at all.

\---

 _A baby._ She lies awake, trying to imagine it, trying to imagine a sweet, dreaming face within her. Little fingers, little toes. She would sing to it. She would be a terrible mother, she is sure, but she would do certain things right. But: a song in the birdish tongue of her beginning, in the clanging languages of the forest years, or in the Japanese that still feels too big for her mouth?

Any. None. But she knows she would sing.

\---

Utena is popular in a way that girls have always been popular, though none save Anthy could know this the way that she does. Even in the darkest times, the Bad Old Times as these children of automation and contraception and factory-made reproductions of furniture that used to eat up a month’s labor have come to call them. There have always been women who dared. Women who leapt and sang and gobbled and scrapped, and yes, in time, nearly all of them were trodden back into the dust. Anthy can remember witch burnings, stonings. Ashes thown into the Seine.

But first, always, come the girls in armor, waving banners and torches and swords aloft. And the other women who watch them, furtively, stealing glances at a future they never quite manage to reach.

\---

_Himemiya._

_Let’s just go home._

\---

She hopes, at least, that Utena—pretty, pugnacious Utena, who is kind to the shyest girl in any classroom and makes a point of stepping on every crunchy leaf—will just be married. That gentlest of ends for these women, that tender muzzling. Her fire will drown in laundry and dishes, in children, in a thousand patient smiles.

It’s not so bad. Anthy could help her, maybe. She’s seen women meet for lunch. Mothers enjoying an afternoon together, sharing pots of tea and cunning little sandwiches. Sunny hours at outdoor tables. Laughter.

They could do that. Maybe. If she asks Akio, if she has left him gasping and sated the night before. He might drive her off campus, and Utena might spend an hour or two away from her children and her husband and her home. And maybe it’d be fun. Maybe it’d nice.

\---

Every evening, Anthy walks to the café with the chairs and violinist and the peonies, and every time, she finds the platters empty.

\---

Saionji sobs into her shoulder. He wants her so badly, he wants everything so badly. He is in pain nearly all of time. It is never absent, only blunted.

“You disgusting child,” she soothes in one of her old languages, pulling it back on like a coat. Saionji trembles in her arms. “There is not one thing about you that I have not seen a thousand, thousand times before, in a thousand, thousand other disgusting children.”

His sobs still. He loves when she comforts him in her mother tongue.

\---

She does love the dress. She loves the richness of its red. She loves its crisp collar, its subtle pleating. Nothing like the whorled silk of other ages, the lace upon ruffles upon flounces, the heart-shaped moles, drawn carefully over syphilitic sores. Cages of whalebone, seed pearls so delicately attached they had to be removed every time the dress was washed.

This dress. This dress stays stiff and full under its own power. She feels it stir around her legs as the duelists clash. It feels like a dress meant for something.

\---

Dios’s power, soul, anger, lament, whatever it is, burns within her like a disease. She’s stopped noticing it, most of the time. But it is there, insisting upon itself.

When she gathers it, when she feels the molten mess of it coalesce into emerald and steel and gold leaf, when the duelist draws it out of her in one swift swoop, when, for a few blessed moments, it is gone, leaving a space like a stomped-out campfire that she never even needed to keep warm—

She takes a deep breath, every time. But the sword goes back in, and dissolves whatever chill swallow of the arena she has tried to secret away.

\---

“Goodness, Miss Nanami!” Anthy smiles, serene amidst the bustle of the home economics classroom, her mouth bristling with pins. “You’re filling out.”

“What? What?” Nanami cranes her neck, attempting to see the seam Anthy has pinched tight. “You must be doing it wrong, I wore this dress last week. Let me see.”

Madame Enoshima strolls over, peering through her tortoiseshell spectacles. “Quite right, Anthy, that hip dart’s about to burst.” She smiles condescendingly. “Overindulgence. It happens to the best of us, my dear.”

Nanami’s shoulders slump. But Anthy is all kindness, all solicitude, as she carefully bastes in an extra two inches of fabric.

\---

Utena meant well by winning her in the duel, and she meant well every time she tried to do the dishes in their shared dorm, and she means well now, when she grins and tells Anthy how much she wishes she had a brother like Akio.

“Only children, right?” She cocks her head to the side. “We’re all spoiled brats! Not like you.”

“No?” Anthy says, mildly, watching the planetarium spin through thousands of years of astral movement.

“No!” Utena stretches out, feline, on the couch. “You’re so…well, giving. You clean everything, and you’re thoughtful, and…you. Y’know. Selfless.”

“Selfless.” Anthy gets up, because Utena’s teacup is empty. “Self less. You’re very kind, Miss Utena.”

\---

 _You stupid girl._ Anthy thrusts; Utena makes the most delicate, silken sound as the sword rips through her liver.

_You stupid girl._

\---

“The man,” the girl had gasped. The embroidery, so particular to that time and place, had been smeared with mud. “The man, in the wolfskins…”

“I know.” Anthy wrapped the girl’s twisted ankle tightly. The splint would hold for now. “Shhh. I know.”

“He…”

“I know.”

Dios, luminous, beckoned her to his chair in the corner. She went, as every girl did, and he kissed away her tears.

“Little one,” he whispered, “who bears up alone in such deep sorrow…”

\---

“I’ll become her prince and save her!”

A voice, a cry, a vow, the last thing to have ever reverberated through her in her entirety. The swords shuddered as it rang off them. It beat its hands against her chest as she shopped for groceries. It filled the coffin like dust, one million motes of promise.

\---

She wasn’t trying to die. Obviously. She sneered the word to no one save herself, but: _obviously_. She’d just wanted to be singular, for a while. To rest, without waking to those big, bright eyes, as blue as veins.

\---

So long ago, before wolves, before princesses, before mobs, there was a bird with a broken wing, and her mother had nursed it back to health.

“It just takes time,” she’d said, the trees Anthy cannot remember native to the place she cannot name making shadows on her face. “Time heals most things.”

\---

Nanami doesn’t eat for days, and then she passes out in gym class.

Utena sits by her bedside in the infirmary, having been the one to bear Nanami there—in her arms, naturally, with a coterie of swooning girls behind her.

“It’s stupid,” Utena sighs. “It’s so stupid that we freak ourselves out like this. And guys just eat whatever they want, of course!”

Anthy watches Nanami’s pulse make itself known at her throat.

“I hope she feels better soon.” Utena straightens the porridge-colored duvet. “I dunno. It’s not fair.”

\---

 _Every girl is like the Rose Bride_ , Dios used to whisper. _Every girl…_

\---

She’d thought, maybe, of having the café cook prepare Touga’s favorite food, and drawing them both there. Or maybe a party. Or an anonymous gift. A forged love letter. A smile.

Instead, a note: scrawled, hasty, tucked into Nanami’s bag. _You are beautiful._

And, it turns out, a mistake in her measurements in home economics. “How silly of me,” Anthy says, smiling. “I must have pinned the fabric wrong. I’ll take this in right away.”

Nanami blinks. “Yes, uh—see that you do.”

\---

 “Witch,” Akio hisses, pawing at her breasts, pinning her to the couch. “Little witch, my sweet little whore, you are, you are, you _are—_ “

\---

After, her head on his shoulder, they watch Venus circle round and round and round.

“We’re nearly there,” Akio murmurs. “Perhaps a week more.”

She gets to her feet.

“Maybe sooner.” He sighs, rolls over, inspects a thread protruding from the collar of his beautiful shirt. “If I can manage it.”

\---

 _The man_ , the girl sobs, _the man came, and he did something terrible, he did—he did something to me—_

\---

 _My prince_ , the girl wails _, I did it for him, please—please, can’t you see, I did it for him—_

\---

 _My brother_ , the girl whispers, _I have to, he needs it, we need it, I have to—_

\---

_Himemiya._

_At last, we meet._

\---

Anthy can’t remember when she bought the dress. Or perhaps she made it—something bright, something that leaves her legs free, something a girl with a place to go wears.

She knows she’s never worn it.

It’s a simple affair: a classic Chanel cut, a smart little bolero jacket and a beret. As pink as the belly of the conch shells she used to collect on the beach, as pink as the roses a mother used to embroider into her little girl’s pinafore.

Not a princess’s clothes, really, Anthy thinks. Nor a witch’s, though that’s closer.

She sits at a café she’s never been to, examining a map, considering her options. Wearing someone else’s clothes.

She supposes she’ll just have to find out who they belong to on the way.


End file.
